At Felt Media, we’ve been designing and building WordPress websites since 2008, and now more than ever, we’re excited about its future. So yeah, we’re about to geek out a bit. This article explains why it’s time to upgrade your WordPress website to a Block Theme.
New & Improved: A Brief History of Block Themes
The Gutenberg visual editor was introduced to WordPress in 2018 as a replacement for the older, clunky rich-text editor. Gutenberg allows for the visual editing of pages in a modern interface. In January 2022, WordPress 5.9 introduced Full Site Editing (FSE). FSE was built on top of Gutenberg and uses a simplified, low-code theme called a Block Theme, allowing admins to edit all aspects of their websites directly in the visual environment.
The intuitiveness of Full Site Editing has reached a level of maturity that is business ready and time saving
In the last nine months, three minor versions of WordPress have been released and include FSE upgrades such as; font management, robust revision history, color sets, font sets, and performance and accessibility upgrades. Full Site Editing is the WordPress WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) of the future, and the intuitiveness of its UI has now reached a level of maturity that is both business ready and time saving.
Preparing for Block Theme Migrations
In January 2025, we invested time and resources into learning the intricacies of WordPress Full Site Editing and Block Themes. Then, we quickly and successfully updated our own site to a custom block theme and migrated it to WordPress.com in order to learn the workflow and work out any issues prior to doing the same for our clients. Our investment in this will benefit all of our clients and we have already built key UI elements and improvements that you will automatically receive during your upgrade.
Is it a simple one-click upgrade to move to a WordPress Block Theme? No, it’s not. But for savvy WordPress designers that have been using Gutenberg for a while (like ahem, us), the migration will be much faster.
Customizing Block Themes to Your Brand
WordPress Full-Site Editing features the ability to use Block Themes in a parent and child relationship. In short, a parent theme is selected from a trusted source, and the child theme is a variation of the parent theme designed for your business’s needs.
Many WordPress themes that were built for the old way of doing things, are not being updated
By building this way, the new parent theme will still benefit from all of the updates and security fixes by the theme developers, while the child theme remains intact with your branding and website layouts.
In 2025, our recommendation is to create a parent and child framework based on the latest WordPress default theme, Twenty Twenty Five, which was developed by the WordPress team (which includes Automattic, owner of WordPress.com). Our expectation is that this theme will be well maintained for years to come, making it an ideal choice as the parent theme.
Advantages of Block Themes
By updating, your business will be able to take advantage of the new design features in Block Themes to enhance security, improve ease of use, and stay current with the latest web design trends to improve overall user experience.
- Enhanced Security: WordPress and Gutenberg are constantly updated, ensuring security vulnerabilities are quickly addressed.
- Ease of Admin Editing: The block-based editor is intuitive and visual. Block themes provide pre-designed layouts and content blocks that can be easily customized.
- Stay Current with Web Design Trends: Block themes are flexible and adaptable, allowing for modern, branded websites.
- Zero PHP Development (or close enough to it): The need to touch PHP code is virtually eliminated.
Your Current Theme May Be Unsupported
Along with the advent and maturation of Full Site Editing, many themes that were built for the old way of doing things, are not being updated. This includes widely popular WordPress Frameworks, such as Genesis, which hasn’t received an update in a year and is estimated to be used on somewhere between 600K – 1MM websites.
An unmaintained theme is potentially dangerous to your business since no one is paying close attention to PHP security issues, or keeping up with modern design guidelines. Especially for this reason, we are strongly encouraging all of our current and future clients to update their WordPress websites to Block Themes.
Ready to upgrade?
Talk to us about updating your WordPress website. And if you’re not already on WordPress.com, we’ll migrate you there at a great monthly rate for the same hosting plan we use.